Doing These Kills Team Engagement and Investment
Taylor Swift said, “You know there’s many different ways to kill the ones we love, the slowest way is never loving them enough”, and it applies more to your business than you think.
And when we talk “love”, we really mean care for (because let’s keep it professional).
Your behaviour matters just as much as theirs, and as a leader, you need to evaluate how you show up for your team and what their experience is.
People are looking for purpose, and the most common way is through their work, so let’s look at the three critical ways that discourage team engagement and investment (so you can keep your team happy, aligned and driven):
Keeping Them Under a Microscope
Let’s not beat around the bush; no one enjoys being surveilled, it creates paranoia, an uneasy feeling and agitation. This is how you make your team feel when you micromanage.
Micromanaging can come in many forms, but some key examples are:
Dictating how tasks are done (e.g. time of completion - within reason)
Constantly monitoring progress (especially when unnecessary)
Being overly critical of minor details
This isn’t to say asking for updates or wanting tasks done a certain way is the issue; the important distinction is reasonability. You can have a process for completing a task, and if it’s a complex one, an SOP document will be your saving grace. Getting updates, too, is reasonable if it’s proportionate to the progress being made and the weight of the task.
If you want your team to feel comfortable and secure in their role and the work they do, micromanaging is one of the fastest ways to promote disengagement and increase your turnover rate.
Where’s the Camaraderie?
Not every business is an “all hands on deck” collaborative structure; it’s very normal for team members to have separate workloads that only have intercommunicative touchpoints at the beginning or end of the task.
The problem exists when, in addition to that, your team members rarely interact, more than just in a professional manner, but in a “water-cooler” way.
Isolation is hard; we all learned that through COVID, so when your team feels isolated from each other, they lack the necessary camaraderie and connection that work is supposed to bring through shared experience and routine.
Remote teams can be even more difficult to keep engaged in this way, as the physical shared energy and space have been removed from the equation. Remote work is not the issue itself, as it brings more accessibility to employment, but it DOES mean that fostering connection and collaboration takes more intention and effort.
Forgetting the Complexity of Being Human
Prioritizing profit over people’s health and wellness is out, and if it’s not in your business, it needs to be. As an employer, you have a duty of care to ensure your team is the best it can be.
The way we work is different from 50 years ago, and the type of fulfilment people are looking for in their jobs, as well as what they hold their employers accountable for in terms of care, has grown (as it should).
If a team member or multiple team members are in burnout, you won’t be able to get the best from them, and that will impact your business. But it’s more than that, because their burnout also impacts their lives: their home life, their social life, their romantic life, and the way they care for themselves. Stressing out your team when they are already mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted will only compound their burnout.
What started as a need for them to take a small step back to make more time for their own care can lead to losing team members.
Health and wellness benefits, time off allowances, and flexibility are all key parts to combating this, or more accurately, to giving your team the proper support they need.
Lead with empathy, lead with trust, and your team will do the same with each other and right back to you.
Whether it’s policies, processes, or coaching from time to time, we can help you help your team!
Explore Signal Terra, People Operations by Signal Operations and book your discovery call today!